Friday, October 31, 2008

Mourning Old Media’s Decline

"USA Today was made exempt from the current rounds of cuts at Gannett but even national papers, including The New York Times, have resorted to modest staff cuts over the last year."

New york times needs to NOT be downsized in any way. It is vitally important.

Nobody gives a shit if Jonny Whoever washed a car in Nowhereland, America. That's why I could care less if a paper from a small city goes from 25 staff to 8 and can't afford the latest five thousand dollar camera.

But NYT is THE best paper in the world.

The reason papers are failing besides the 'it's very hard to make money on web ads' reason, is because if you flip a paper, there are like two stories that are appealing. In today's world, we might read 20 articles a day. (We're in an instant information age.) So that is why we fulfill our interests with blogs and different views.

So what to do? Hire smarter people to write stories. Listen to the readers and write articles about their interests. Use more than ONE photo EVEN IN THE PAPER VERSION for an article. Make the photos look every bit as good as the Entourage advertisement in your paper. It's called sharpening.

Embrace radical new designs for paper newspapers. Make them look better. Let an art director/graphic designer have their way with an entire section. That happens with magazines and video magazines.

Find a paper that is less dirty. Reward your paper readers.

Less can be more. Filling an entire page is optional.

If it looks better, people will buy it. True story.

But the number one thing is longer stories. You are covering it anyway. If I can read a story in two minutes, it's not interesting. NYT does this right.